If you want to grow your business, you should create a B2B marketing strategy plan. Follow the steps and achieve your goals.

B2B marketing is a great way to increase your company’s ROI and strategically grow your business. It helps you allocate your resources in the most effective ways possible, which in turn yields more customers and a more successful business.

A marketing plan is one of the most important things you can do for your company. It will serve as your roadmap for how to get your name out there and how to reach your goals. And, just like with a car, you’ll need to keep checking in on it and making adjustments to keep it running smoothly.

How to Create a B2B Marketing Strategy

Create a vision for your business.

A vision is a clear, authentic statement of what you hope to accomplish in the future of your business. It can inspire you and help keep you focused on what’s important when you’re feeling overwhelmed. The process of creating a vision also helps you think strategically about how to achieve your goals. For example, if it’s part of your company’s vision to increase its online presence, maybe that means it’s time to invest in content marketing and SEO (search engine optimization).

Here are some examples from different companies:

• Amazon – “To be the best customer-service driven Internet retailer in the world.”
• IKEA – “To create more peaceful living through innovative products for people everywhere.”
• Twitter – “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.”

Understand Your Target B2B Customer.

In business-to-business (B2B) marketing, you need to know the people on both sides of the sale: the purchasing decision-maker and the person who will actually be using your product or service. It’s important to speak directly to both of them, because they often have different needs that must be addressed before they both sign off on a purchase.

The purchasing decision-maker is usually focused on cost, efficiency, and technical specifications. They want to make sure that your product or service is financially feasible, that it will help their organisation achieve what they need it to achieve, and that they won’t have too much trouble figuring out how it works.

The end user is often more concerned with usability—whether they’ll like using your product or service. If the end user doesn’t like using your product or service, the whole thing is a bust.

If you can show each customer that your product or service addresses their concerns, you’re much more likely to close the sale.

Determine how you will reach your target audience.

As with most businesses, the best place to figure out how you will reach your target audience is to look at what your competitors are doing. Look at your competitors’ marketing and advertising materials to find out where they advertise and why. You can also use tools like Quantcast Measure to get a better idea of who is coming to their websites, and where they are coming from. When you have a better idea of who is buying from your competition, you’ll be able to decide which marketing channels will work best for you.

It’s important that the channels you choose align with the nature of your customers and prospects. For example, if they don’t visit social media sites very often, then it doesn’t make sense for you to spend a lot of time on social media campaigns. Instead, focus on email marketing or direct mail campaigns instead.

Decide what steps you will take to engage customers.

You need to decide how you will engage your customers. You can’t spread yourself too thin, but at the same time, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. There are many possibilities including:

• Industry events and conferences
• Building relationships with influencers
• Starting a newsletter
• Writing blog posts
• Build a social media presence on platforms like Facebook and Twitter
• Start a Facebook group around your niche topic (not related to your company or product)
• Start a podcast or YouTube channel that is not directly related to your business; it should be focused on the niche market of people who might be interested in what you sell.

Test and measure each tactic in your plan.

Testing and measuring your plan should be a regular part of your marketing activities. With each tactic, track its progress and measure results to determine its effectiveness.

To keep track of the performance of each tactic, use analytics tools. You can also do a cost-benefit analysis on each tactic, just to see if it’s working for you or not.

Below are some ways to test and measure tactics you have in place:

• Use tools like HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to analyse your website for its overall quality. This tool will give you suggestions about what changes would improve your site, as well as where it is successful.
• Have regular meetings with the people on your marketing team and analyse whether or not they are meeting their goals and deadlines.
• If you want to test traffic sources, create different landing pages that all send visitors to the same page of your website so that you can track how many people came from which link.

Evaluate tactics that are working, tweak tactics that aren’t, and eliminate the ones that aren’t aligned with your vision.

Final Takeaways:

Takeaways should include doing an analysis, creating a vision, testing and measuring, tweaking and aligning your strategy to that vision, launching a campaign as part of executing on it, and evaluating results to see what you might do differently next time.

• Don’t have a dedicated marketing team? You might want to start by doing an analysis of the effectiveness of your current marketing programs. This will help you understand which tactics are working and what else you might want to try.
• Data-driven decision-making is critical for marketing success, so how do you get buy-in from your leadership team if they don’t have any data? A new product or service won’t launch without the necessary research and testing, so why should your marketing strategy be any different? It helps to document a clear rationale for why you’re investing in specific tactics. A great way to do that is with a plan that lays out where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you’re going next year.
• What if marketing really isn’t a core competency for your company? Maybe it’s time to outsource it. Outsourcing presents an opportunity to cultivate relationships with agencies that will stick around over the long term and who can bring fresh perspectives every now and then. The key is finding someone who gets B2B sales cycles because not every agency does.

It is vital to create a B2B marketing strategy. However there are other important facts, such as choosing the right brand imagery for your business. If you are not sure where to start, contact us, and we will help you leverage your business opportunities.